A control and communication system of said manner includes among other things a number of automation units which are connected in one level of the command structure or hierarchy of the system to a common communication bus. Such systems are also called peer-to-peer systems and the respective communication between the automation units is called peer-to-peer (PtP) communication. In these peer-to-peer systems, in order to solve control and communication objects of technical plants a particularly high number of signals has to be exchanged. Accordingly, often up to 30 automation units have to be installed at a single communication bus and up to 200 signals have to be exchanged for each communication connection and direction.
As shown in FIG. 1, in known peer-to-peer systems so called communication components or communication chips 14 and 16 have been used, which were arranged in pairs in two corresponding automation units (not shown). One of the communication components 14, the sending component, collects several signals and transmits them altogether to the corresponding receiving component 16 of the another automation unit. Thereby, each automation unit is working on the basis of a corresponding function plan. FIG. 1 shows the function plans 10 and 12 of the automation units and the corresponding communication components 14 and 16. The communication components 14 and 16 are addressed via signal connectors 18 transferring signals between a signal database (not shown) and the communication components 14. A particular partnership relation 20 is appointed between the communication components 14 and 16 by means of a partner number 22 for each partner or communication component 14 and 16, and further by means of an identification number 24 for each of the communication components 14 and 16 within the partnership relation 20. In addition, a succession relation 26 is to be defined by means of an assignment of the incoming and outgoing connections, so that the signals are not interchanged.
The disadvantages of these known systems and methods are a rather high risk of failures because of peer-to-peer communication components which have to be parameterised and interconnected manually. Further, the documentation of these manual designs is often rather incomplete, signals of different technologies are or have to be collected for a common transfer, and a navigation over several function plans is not possible either.